Microsoft has begun bundling basic mobile device management (MDM) capabilities with all commercial Office 365 subscriptions, as it said it would at last year's TechEd Europe conference.
Beginning on Monday, companies with Office 365 Business, Enterprise, EDU, or Government subscriptions can manage Android, iOS, and Windows Phone …

Office 365 files may load just a little faster in Australia today, after Microsoft announced it has flicked the switch for the local version of the service.
Redmond's outpost has also decided the time is right to serve Dynamics CRM from its Australian bit barns in Sydney and Melbourne.
Like the local version of Azure, the two …

Microsoft is terminating its SharePoint Online Public Website service, effective January 2015.
SharePoint Online Public Website lets Office 365 users create a website and customise it with in-browser tools.
In an advisory posted on Friday, Microsoft explains that “As part of the evolution of the Office 365 service, we …

A hosted edition of LibreOffice is planned as a free and open alternative to Office 365 and Google Docs by year's end.
The suite would provide online editing and sharing of documents written using the free, open-source suite.
The Document Foundation said on Wednesday that LibreOffice contributor Collabora is working with …

Enterprise backup firm Asigra has added Office 365 support to its Cloud Backup product.
This is a cloud-to-cloud service sending backup data to authorised cloud service providers or to the customer's private cloud.
IT admins choose the frequency and granularity of the backups and recovery is said to be both fast and simple, …

MWC 2015
The man behind Samsung Knox, Dr Injong Rhee, says a deal with Microsoft will see Office 365 bundled with the Knox secure enterprise workspace.
Rhee was speaking at Samsung’s Enterprise Mobility Showcase, part of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Knox is a secure container built into Samsung’s Android devices. It includes both …

Microsoft is putting its Office 365 crown jewels on display, opening up APIs to the environment to attract third-party developers to the platform.
The APIs are yours for the taking here, along with resources and guides for developers. Microsoft imagines applications such as integrating a reservation system with a user's calendar …

Microsoft has added a video portal to Office 365, enabling users to upload and share videos. The service will be in preview soon, and available to all customers with the right kind of subscription in early 2015.
So what is the point, when YouTube does this so well? The idea is to manage internal videos with permissions based on …

Thomas Hansen, worldwide veep of Microsoft's small and medium business organisation, has urged resellers to adopt a “flexible” attitude to profit when selling Office 365 at a conference in China - as those who sign up for the cloudy suite become easier to up-sell to other Microsoft offerings.
Speaking at the Canalys Channels …

Microsoft has introduced a new subscription model for Office 365 and this time it's literally personal: the new “Office 365 Personal” makes the productivity suite available for just two devices – one PC or Mac and one tablet – for $US69.99 a year.
That's a small discount on the $83.88 it would cost to pay the $6.99-a-month …

Lots of Australian businesses have already jumped aboard Microsoft's cloudwagon, often after having been told that the latency associated with data centres on foreign soil was no impediment to anything at all.
What, then, to make of Microsoft's announcement that Office 365 and Dynamics CRM will be on offer from its Australian …

Microsoft is still keen to shift its perpetual-license Office customers over to the Office 365 subscription model, and to that end it's planning a shakeup of its Office 365 plans for small and midsized businesses to offer customers more value and greater flexibility.
Beginning on October 1, Redmond will launch three new Office …

Microsoft’s advice to its channel partners to sell Office 365 as a loss leader to lure in small and medium sized customers is not something that sits well with suppliers, at least not in Blighty.
Thomas Hansen, worldwide veep for Microsoft's Small and Medium Business organisation told attendees at the Asian Canalys Channels …

Microsoft last week flicked the switch on its offer of 1 terabyte of storage for all Office 365 users.
The new deal has been read as a strike at Google's online offerings. But if you can find an envelope and a pencil stub, it looks like Redmond is taking a swipe at Amazon Web Services' Glacier cold storage facility, too.
Here's …

Life is about to get more expensive for some folk living in Microsoft's Office 365 world with a 15 per cent price hike in the offing from August.
This is the first time Redmond has decided to ignore the unwritten laws of the cloudy industry by upping its price list for punters - those with an Enterprise Agreement that haven't …

Microsoft is expanding its Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools. DLP is a way of tagging content to mark it as sensitive data and subject to policy, such as a rule that states “data must be encrypted” or “may not be shared outside the organisation”.
DLP is already available for email in Exchange, Outlook and Office 365, and is now …

Analysis
Microsoft has announced new APIs and mobile software development kits for Office 365, its cloud platform for email, document storage, and collaboration.
Office 365 uses Azure Active Directory (AD) for authentication, and the company is pushing the idea of using this not only for Office 365, but also as a corporate cloud identity …

Microsoft has launched two new initiatives designed to help its Office 365 business customers more easily anticipate forthcoming changes to the online service, including a public roadmap and a voluntary program that allows customers to receive some updates early.
One benefit of using cloudy services such as Office 365 is that …

David Sacks, cofounder and former CEO of Yammer, has left his position at Microsoft after having steered the enterprise social networking service for nearly six years.
Sacks, a former PayPal exec who has been an angel investor in various startups and even once dabbled in producing and financing an independent feature film, …

Vid
This week, Trevor Pott kicked off his exploration of Office 365 with this overview.
Trevor and his team-mate Josh Folland have also produced four hands-on videos for Office 365. We will broadcast these over the next week or so – all free, all on demand.
Here is the first, an Office 365 tutorial.
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Vid
In the fourth and final video of our short how-to series on Office 365, Trevor Pott explores the software's unified communications' capabilities.
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paper cut-out men holding hands in linked semi-circle

Microsoft is beefing up the security in Office 365 by offering two-factor authentication to all users of its cloud productivity service.
The company said that it would enable two-factor authentication on accounts ranging from Enterprise and Midsize Business plans to academic accounts and standalone single-user subscription plans …

Live Chat
Our favourite sysadmin Trevor Pott has been digging deep into Office 365 in recent weeks.
But even Trevor is only human, and there may be features you feel he hasn't fully touched on, or corners of the cloudy platform that haven't been properly aired so far.
So we ran a Live Chat on Monday 24 June, when you had the opportunity …

The migration of Parliamentary mailboxes to Office 365 has left some ministers in a muddle, and caused others to question why the Houses did not decide to use the "free" alternative from Google.
The Office 365 migration began in January but was delayed due to an unrelated network upgrade cockup that led to web outages and …

Microsoft has written to its Australian customers to apologise in advance for failing to meet a self-imposed deadline for the opening of a portal that would let them sell Office 365.
The missed deadline was revealed by Steven Miller, Microsoft Australia's Office division lead, in a Thursday post.
“Earlier this year, we …

Video
Spinning up a new instance of Office 365 to provide email for a brand new domain is easy; migrating email from existing domains is not.
If you're a systems administrator who can count to 10 more or less accurately you're probably okay to dive in, but the everyday non-technical user will still find it a bit of a struggle.
In the …

Microsoft will soon debut a new formulation of its Office 365 subscription service aimed at individual consumers, the company said on Thursday, and in the process it hinted that new, touch-centric Office apps may be coming soon.
"We recognize that there are households of all shapes and sizes and we're committed to delivering the …

WPC
Microsoft has relinquished more control over the way third-party suppliers can manage Office 365 and Windows InTune punters, finally making the channel the "first point of contact" for customers.
It is now three years since the online productivity suite hit the streets. It took two years until Microsoft would allow third-party …

Vid
Over the last couple of weeks, our sysadmin columnist Trevor Pott has been digging deep in to Office 365, producing a series of hands-on articles and videos. This, the third of four videos, is about the user and device management features you can find in O365.
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Screenshot of Microsoft promotional video touting …

Microsoft will roll out free email migration services for Office 365 punters from the start of next month as it tries to accelerate adoption.
At the same time, it is preparing to once again hurl buckets of cash at channel partners, those selling higher margin stuff, with the aim of getting customers to buy more cloudy …

Microsoft has released the first preview build of Office for Mac 2016, its next edition of the software for Apple PCs.
The Word, Excel et al suite can now be downloaded and tested out by the anyone with an OS X Yosemite or later machine.
"Office 2016 for Mac shares an unmistakably Office experience – but it is also thoughtfully …

Office 365 is the “fastest growing business” in Microsoft’s history, the software giant has claimed.
Microsoft reckons it has seen a 150 per cent increase in the number of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) adopting Office 365 in the last year.
Windows Azure, the company’s alternative to Amazon’s public cloud, now has …

Microsoft's not been kind to Office for Mac over the years: since the last major update in 2010 fanbois haven't had much to get excited about.
Redmond recently revealed revisions are on the way, with a late-2015 target delivery date. But the company's now snuck out a small set of enhancements to Outlook for Mac.
The updates …

“Cloud first” is Microsoft’s new mantra. The vision is of businesses using Office 365, running in Microsoft’s Global data centres, for collaborating, conferencing, messaging and calendaring.
The shift towards Office 365 becomes more marked every quarter as more IT departments adopt Microsoft’s cloud offerings. The appeal is that …

A botched network upgrade at the Houses of Parliament caused comms bottlenecks, web outages and continuing capacity woes – and could yet delay the full rollout of Office 365 for our lords and masters.
Director of Parliamentary ICT Joan Miller emailed staff on 4 March to apologise for the "frustrating and inconvenient" episode …

Microsoft's legion of Office 365 floggers have waited 18 months for a tool that allows them to manage customers using the cloudy suite, and in that time blindly fielded some calls from irate folk suffering outages.
But help is finally at hand, according to Adam Jung, senior product manager of the Office 365 team: a bigger and …

Microsoft has finally put a date on what will be its first new version of Office for OS X since 2010.
The software giant said that the second half of 2015 will bring the release of the first new version of Office for Mac in more than four years. That edition will bless Mac users with new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and …

Microsoft has unveiled the first in a series of planned updates to its Office 365 licensing plans for potentially easier upgrades.
The Office 365 blog has outlined the options, announced at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in July as “transition SKUs”, for users to upgrade.
The Switch plans come with certain …

The Australian State of Queensland does not observe daylight saving and an old joke about the state says that air travellers entering the region have in the past been advised to “turn your watch back one hour and 50 years.”
How then, to consider the State's decision to head for the cloud with a 149,000-seat deal for Microsoft's …

Microsoft has once again made its Office apps for Android tablets available for download, this time opening up the preview program to all comers.
The software giant first offered the fondleslab versions of its Android Office apps to a limited trial group in November, but shut down its sign-up page not long after, once it had …

Microsoft has made a version of its Office software available to Android users - as long as they are not using a tablet.
Subscribers to Office 365 can download the app for free using Google Play and then spreadsheet away to their heart's content. All that's required, apart from the subscription, is Android 4.0 and a mobile …

Microsoft and Dropbox have inked a deal to integrate their cloud-hosted stuff: mobile users of Office 365 will be able to automatically save files to their Dropbox account from within Redmond's software.
And Dropbox users will also be able to edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files within the Dropbox and share them within the …

Google's given Microsoft Office an awkward hug by refreshing Drive so it plays nice with desktop applications.
Drive is Google's share 'n' sync offering and integrates tightly with its apps: drop a document into Drive and you can read or edit it in the Docs in-browser word processor. That tool's not to everyone's tastes and …

Microsoft will publish data on the reliability of Office 365 to boost confidence in the online service – and yet it also warned that more outages are possible.
The software giant said in a blog titled Cloud services you can trust: Office 365 availability that it now plans to publish uptime numbers for Office 365. The figures …

Microsoft's December patching palaver keeps getting worse, with news that one of this month's brood is breaking Excel macros.
Redmond's already had to back-pedal on the December 2014 update for Windows Root Certificate Program in Windows and also this month pulled a faulty Exchange update.
Now comes news that MS14-082, one of …

Microsoft on Monday began rolling out its promised social-networking features for Office 365, in the form of a product it has freshly dubbed Office Delve.
The tech, which was first unveiled at Redmond's SharePoint conference in March under the codename "Project Oslo," aims to present Office 365 users with the information that's …

Review
If a picture tells 1,000 words, then an interactive bubble chart indexed by year based on a data model with a hierarchy of sub-categories ought to speak volumes.
Microsoft’s business intelligence product Power BI is the latest addition to Office 365, its online office suite designed to integrate with desktop versions of Office …

Microsoft let slip a few more details of its plans for the company's Office productivity suite on Thursday, including hints about when we can expect the next major version of its desktop suite to land.
Most of the Office talk at Wednesday's Windows 10 preview event in Redmond focused on the touch-centric Office for Windows 10 …

Microsoft has reached a milestone in its ongoing efforts to make personal productivity a cloudy caper, by switching on Office 365 available to users in 38 new markets and three new languages including Vietnamese and Malay.
Asian and African countries featured heavily on the list of newly Office-in-the-cloud-equipped markets with …